﻿Case Study: Accountability﻿Englewood Fire Department

ChallengeFielding an average of 12 calls per day with a relatively limited fleet makes it difficult to keep track of the department’s apparatus. “Making sure our rigs are always response-ready is a huge priority for us,” notes Mark Ertle, Englewood Fire’s Battalion Chief. “We only have 6 apparatus for our busy department, so we need to minimize out-of-service time as best as we can.”

Battalion Chief Ertle and the rest of the Englewood Fire Department were looking for a solution to streamline the communication between crews and officers, so that once a repair request is made, it could get taken care of as quickly as possible.

﻿Solution﻿Battalion Chief Ertle heard about PSTrax through a friend on social media. The department had been using a set of customized maintenance logbooks for each of their 6 apparatus. When they decided to try PSTrax, all of these paper logs were converted into digital versions. “We literally went from doing our checks on logbooks one day to doing them on our tablets the next,” claims Ertle.

﻿Results﻿“PSTrax has helped improve the communication between our crews and officers,” says Battalion Chief Ertle. “If there’s a problem on one of the rigs, an alert is sent to the officers for review. This helps us catch problems early on, before they become major issues. It’s also helped us significantly reduce our out-of-service time.”

The Englewood Fire Department continues to use PSTrax to track and document nearly everything in its stations: truck and equipment checks, PPE & SCBA bottles, drug inventories, station chores, and more.

Englewood Fire Department is a full-service agency that covers the city of Englewood, Colorado. Though the area covered is relatively small, the fire department is one of the busiest in the nation per square mile of area and per capita. There are 3 stations that house 50 firefighters and 6 apparatus. In 2015, Englewood Fire merged with Denver Fire Department.

"We literally went from doing our checks on logbooks one day to doing them on tablets the next."-Battalion Chief Mark Ertle